Delete (unlink) files matching a regex

Question

I want to delete several files from a directory, matching a regex. Something like this:

// WARNING: not real code require('fs').unlink(/script\.\d+\.js$/); 

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Since unlink doesn't support regexes, I'm using this instead:

var fs = require('fs');  fs.readdir('.', (error, files) => {     if (error) throw error;      files.filter(name => /script\.\d+\.js$/.test(name)).forEach(fs.unlink); }); 

which works, but IMO is a little more complex than it should be.

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Is there a better built-in way to delete files that match a regex (or even just use wildcards)?

Answer 1

No there is no globbing in the Node libraries. If you don't want to pull in something from NPM then not to worry, it just takes a line of code. But in my testing the code provided in other answers mostly won't work. So here is my code fragment, tested, working, pure native Node and JS.

let fs = require('fs') const path = './somedirectory/' let regex = /[.]txt$/ fs.readdirSync(path)     .filter(f => regex.test(f))     .map(f => fs.unlinkSync(path + f)) 

Answer 2

You can look into glob https://npmjs.org/package/glob

require("glob").glob("*.txt", function (er, files) { ... }); //or files = require("glob").globSync("*.txt"); 

glob internally uses minimatch. It works by converting glob expressions into JavaScript RegExp objects. https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch

You can do whatever you want with the matched files in the callback (or in case of globSync the returned object).